"What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?"
About this Quote
Two deceptively simple questions, staged like a Socratic trap. Leon Kass isn’t offering inspiration; he’s setting the terms of a debate he thinks modern life keeps trying to dodge. “Individual” sounds like a given in a liberal society, but Kass treats it as an achievement, even a problem: Are we self-made choosers, or creatures formed by family, tradition, bodily limits, and obligations we didn’t select? The first question quietly presses on the thinness of contemporary identity language, where “being yourself” can collapse into consumer preference or therapeutic self-assertion.
The second question, “to flourish,” sharpens the blade. Kass is a bioethicist steeped in Aristotle and skeptical of a culture that confuses comfort, longevity, or frictionless autonomy with a good life. He’s asking whether flourishing is measurable (health metrics, productivity, life extension) or moral (character, purpose, responsible freedom). Subtext: if we cannot say what flourishing is, then our most powerful technologies and institutions will default to whatever is easiest to quantify or monetize.
Context matters: Kass’s public career, including his role chairing the President’s Council on Bioethics in the early 2000s, unfolded amid fights over cloning, genetic engineering, and the promise of “enhancement.” Read there, these questions are a warning flare. Before we rewrite bodies, extend lifespans, or optimize traits, Kass wants an older, inconvenient conversation back on the table: What kind of human are we trying to make, and by whose definition of the good?
The second question, “to flourish,” sharpens the blade. Kass is a bioethicist steeped in Aristotle and skeptical of a culture that confuses comfort, longevity, or frictionless autonomy with a good life. He’s asking whether flourishing is measurable (health metrics, productivity, life extension) or moral (character, purpose, responsible freedom). Subtext: if we cannot say what flourishing is, then our most powerful technologies and institutions will default to whatever is easiest to quantify or monetize.
Context matters: Kass’s public career, including his role chairing the President’s Council on Bioethics in the early 2000s, unfolded amid fights over cloning, genetic engineering, and the promise of “enhancement.” Read there, these questions are a warning flare. Before we rewrite bodies, extend lifespans, or optimize traits, Kass wants an older, inconvenient conversation back on the table: What kind of human are we trying to make, and by whose definition of the good?
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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